


go for the throat

by orphan_account



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Bad Friend Clary Fray, Canon Compliant, Character Turned Into Vampire, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Immortality, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Betrayal, Raphael “i clean up your fucking messes” Santiago, Self-Hatred, Starvation, and all its unique complications, chronological? i think, fuck camille, humans and shit, really self-indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22561414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "You're clinging," Raphael's voice says from behind him, like a stupid inside joke.
Relationships: Simon Lewis/Raphael Santiago
Comments: 4
Kudos: 170





	1. Chapter 1

_i._

He gets acquainted with the taste of ash. Chicken, coffee, lemon-flavored cough drops. There’s texture there, as he holds the liquid in his mouth, ever-cooling, but it tastes of nothing but the pit of a hearth.

Simon spits it out, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and laments.

An eternity without caffeine. A life without coffee--without food, without his mom, his sister, his friends--is no life at all. 

This is no life at all.

Distantly, he feels the same fear he had felt when his biology teacher had pointed at a picture of frogs and had said, “These little guys see a whole world of colors we will never be able to see. Just because our biology doesn’t allow it. Three cones only, people.”

It twists inside his chest, that feeling, but he doesn’t even have a heart anymore, so. What does it matter. 

"You're clinging," Raphael's voice says from behind him, like a stupid inside joke.

“No,” Simon turns around, adamant, because it’s important that nothing shows, because Raphael is his _enemy_ , “I’m not. At all. Just confirming hypotheses and,” a lame hand gesture towards nothing in particular, “Getting to know the new me.” 

Unconvinced and unimpressed in a way only he could achieve in a single look, Raphael shrugs and tilts his chin to the side. “There’s no compromise here, fledgling,” he says, and Simon hates the way there’s no contempt in that, no pity to be found (not like in Clary’s eyes, in every warm-blooded fiber of her being, he can fucking smell it on her--the guilt), “No negotiations to be had. Your body is yours, and your body only requires one thing.” 

“I know,” Simon interrupts, and he does. He just doesn’t want to hear it. Or believe it. He turns his head away and lets his mussed bangs tickle across his brow, as if to avert his gaze from the truth. Metaphors and other useless shit, “I know, okay?”

“Really,” and then a graze of a touch at the edge of Simon’s left eye; Raphael holds up his thumb, smeared with a speck of blood. He looks at Simon, expectant.

Oh. “Don't,” Simon says. 

Raphael looks at him for longer, and when he reaches down to wipe his thumb on his dark leather jacket, Simon feels an odd sensation of relief that makes the insides of his chest ache. 

_ii. to cling_

Raphael never realizes how specific Simon's trauma is until he sees Emily bent over him, sees the fledgling’s body and eyes and face stilled and unbroken by breath, a habit he had not yet learned to break. 

“Step away,” Raphael says. His voice is directed at her, who turns her head to meet his gaze, panic a sharp edge to her mouth.

“Oh,” and she gets it, almost immediately. The truth has always been forceful. “Fuck,” Emily is already at the door, looking back at Simon with a sadness and a pity and a guilt that unsettles Raphael’s gut. 

“Sorry,” and then she’s gone, chased away.

Raphael is left with the mess. Simon hasn’t moved, still staring at the high ceiling of the room, unseeing. Still not breathing. 

He makes his way to him the way a human would; step by step by step. He lets his footsteps sound out against the carpeted floor, the faint putter interspersed with silence. He hears it like a drum, every beat a minor tremor sounded out in the cavity of his skull.

“Fledgling,” Raphael says, once. Then, when nothing comes back: “Simon.” That gets a twitch, and it’s response enough. Raphael softens his voice further.

“You are safe here.” His hand grazes Simon’s shoulder and that does something, because Simon is instantly backed up against the couch, breath falling out of his mouth and nose in pants and wheezes and everything not right.

Raphael pulls his hand back, tucks his fingers into his pockets to keep them there. “Simon. Simon, you are safe here. This isn’t the room you were attacked in. She isn’t here. She can’t,” and the small sound that comes free from Simon’s throat rings in Raphael's ears, “Get to you. Not anymore.”

The hard line of him gives only a little. So Raphael repeats, over and over again: 

“You are safe,”

“She isn’t here,”

And, “Simon,” with finality: “I will look after you.”

_iii. His name_

“What do I do if I can't say the G-word?”

He asks as soon as he steps into the lobby, still stinking of Shadowhunters and dog. Raphael is not there to meet him, not immediately but he may as well be, on the first floor in the seconds it takes to traverse planes.

Simon doesn't look at him when he nears, hunched, hands shoved deep in his pockets, and so Raphael knows.

“You practice or find alternatives,” he says, and without pause: “What did they say?”

“Um," an exhale, a twitch of a nervous smile. "Nothing new. The usual you-are-an-abomination-that-shouldn’t-be-allowed-to-exist spiel.” Simon shrugs, a helpless motion that he always wears too well, and finally looks at Raphael, eyes not as bright as they should be. Anger flares through. 

“They know that we were human, once.” Raphael says, sharp. “They know, and they know that most of us were turned against our will, and that's it. That's all they are willing to understand. They don't know _anything_ about your struggles, or mine, or the clan's." Raphael watches Simon's face, the bare vestiges of realization taking shape there.

"They don't care enough to."

_iv. to be (human)_

But Clary asks, and Simon can think of only _yes, of course, anything._ The knowing glimmer in her eye, that familiar slant of her smile makes it worth it, for a time. Even when Camilla looks at him and licks her lips, even when he feels most of him go numb.

And then the look on Raphael's face happens, and his words that had seared like the glint of sun through the crack of curtains, and--and, honestly. 

Regret is the one thing he should've been able to predict.

When he goes back with them (Shadowhunters, another thing that's reduced to ash in his mouth) to the Institute, and lays down in what used to be his cot, Raphael’s voice comes to him. It laughs: _they were never your family._

_v._

Centuries too soon to take pride in being a vampire, he had said. I'll look after you, he had said. They don't care enough to, he had said.

Raphael puts out the hit order. 

_vi. (hypocritical)_

(What had that thing been, the one that takes years and decades to perfect? 

Encanto. Like a broken spell, the veil falls from Simon’s eyes and spills from there in hot blood.)

He goes on the run, for obvious reasons and then some, and Luke and Magnus and even Jace try to tempt him back with promises of a bed and packs of blood and he just runs, runs, runs. Starves.

Then he almost rips a girl’s throat out.

_vi. otherworldy means, like cruelty_

"Raphael." His name, in someone else's mouth, one he hasn't heard from in weeks, months, even.

Before him, Simon is a wane figure, eyes dark and unfocused. But his voice is clear when he says, "I've come to die."

Anger snaps to nothing on the back of his tongue. "What."

Simon still hasn't moved from the spot, eyes sliding closed before peeling open, again. Slow. "I've come to die," he repeats, as if Raphael for all his enhanced senses hadn't heard him the first time.

It's not anger that makes his fingers twitch. Something deeper, unsettling the hollow pits of his stomach. He hasn't fed since yesterday. "Why?"

They meet eyes again. Simon looks dead. "I almost hurt a civilian," he says, and the first trace of emotion shows. His eyes flash, bright. "A mundane. I could've killed her," Simon's right hand jerks, the claws there damning. "So I've come to be killed."

He hangs his head, then, exposing his neck. Raphael doesn't need to breathe, but somewhere along his throat everything stops, shutters shut. 

"Vampires don't do mercy killings, right? Just get on with it," a small upward curve of his cracked lips. He's too pale. Simon drags his head up, tilts his chin just so they can cross gazes again. "You must have some idea of what you want to do to me."

It's not anger that makes his fingers flex, reach forward, sink into the ratty material of Simon's shirt. When Raphael yanks Simon off the street and into the lobby, his fangs are out and something hot burns at the back of his eyes.

"You don't," Raphael hisses a breath away from Simon's face, "Get to say that."

Simon, like the fledgling he is, laughs. And laughs. The sound tastes like ash. "Sorry," he says, limp in Raphael's grip. "Sorry," 


	2. pressure point

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In all his years, Camille has never listened to him.

> _All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom._  
>  -Mary Oliver

"He let you walk," he said. "You. His murderer." 

Her fangs were already out, shining in the cut of moonlight. "I am his sire,” a stroke of finger down his pulse point; she turns and smiles into the edge of his mouth. “And he isn’t much of a traitor, is he? What a good boy, my little caramel,” and she bites, lightly, at the place where neck meets shoulder, and Raphael feels Simon balk. Blood rises into the air, dense and afraid. A near imperceptible sound leaves Simon's lips, and Raphael _hates_. 

His cross burns at the base of his throat, but he spits them out easily enough:

"You are a wretched creature," the words half a century old. Camille sneers at him, contemptuous. In all his years, Raphael has never known Camille to be grateful. Not even when Magnus had bowed to her out of the love in his heart, not even when he had relented to her cruelty the way their caskets fall shut at the barest sliver of sunlight. And maybe that is it; that the moon turns their cold bodies even colder, and centuries of deadness sucks out the empathy that had once been a cornerstone of their humanity.

Perhaps she will be his destiny, some hundreds of hundreds of years down the line. But he will never forget his family, and he will never forget Magnus. And.

Simon still won't meet his eyes.

"Fledgling," he says, _fool._ Raphael wills their eyes to meet, and Simon finally turns his face towards him. 

"Don't scream," Raphael says, and his claws are out before any of them can blink. 

In all his years, Camille has never listened to him.


	3. old truths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _oh, your tender touch,_
> 
> “I was wondering when you’d cave,”

When he slams him into hard brick with two fists and one harsh push, Simon doesn’t breathe, not even a stutter. But he does say, low under his breath and without the barest hint of kidding:

“I was wondering when you’d cave,” and he’s learned to meet the anger in Raphael’s eyes, because the moment their eyes do, meet, something sparks and another putters out. 

But by that time Simon is already across the room, crumbling off the adjacent wall.

“Get ready,” Raphael says, as if his bitterness hadn’t overwhelmed him. He’s suddenly tired, bones buckling slightly under the weight of his aches and mistakes and other horrors.

God, he has whole centuries still ahead of him.

Simon pulls himself off the ground and his knees (which is a good look on him, swearing fealty almost, what a _novel_ idea), and gives a short nod. The clumsiness of his movements, all stumbling and awkward, have dried up, leaving an unfamiliar grace in its wake.

It's less than strange. Uncanny, almost. 

Then there’s a surprised shout, the most Simon in a sound Raphael has heard thus far, that drifts through the floors and stalls the thought. Ah, Raphael thinks. He reaches the first floor of DuMort in less than a second.

Clary sees him the moment he appears. “Raphael,” she says, in lieu of greeting, with Simon off to the side, looking all at once unsure. The rest of her cohort is nowhere in sight, not even a trace of the Lightwoods. Thank God, he thinks, vehement. 

“Good evening,” he says. The venom is hardly concealed, a knife gripped in plain sight. “Get out.”

She doesn’t budge, chin going up in defiance, not really because of courage or moral high grounds or other cheap angelic horseshit. Just entitlement. “Not without Simon.”

“Clary,” Simon says, a warning. 

“You broke our alliance,” Raphael says, slow, as if he were speaking with a particularly obtuse child. He adjusts his stance, casually, squaring his shoulders so he can be ready. “You have no right to be here, no right to make demands of me. Not anymore.” He lets his teeth show, and this should’ve held true since the beginning: “Not ever.”

“I won’t leave without Simon.” Her eyes flash, never leaving his. Her body shifts, too, as if in preparation for an attack. Simon hovers at the back, silent, right at the edge of Raphael’s peripheral. 

And then Clary’s fingers curl over her seraph blade.

And then a hiss that doesn’t come from Raphael’s lips.

“Don’t,” Simon’s voice, clear and cold, breaks through the ice in the air. Clary finds his eyes immediately, and what must she see there for her grip to go slack.

“What are you talking about, Simon?” The first inflection of emotion shows, after the surprise. “Don’t you want to come back?” 

Raphael feels Simon's eyes on his back, but doesn’t turn to look. In one stride, Simon is next to him, and Raphael lets himself blink, shift his eyes, and look for it: any sign of doubt, or fear, or grief, all precursors to betrayal.

Simon looks grim, lips pressed thin, eyes inscrutable. “I don’t want to.” 

Raphael hears Clary’s breath hitch. Something like not-yet satisfaction turns the edge of his mouth sharp. “What? Are you serious? But,” she turns her attention onto Raphael, and he can determine the exact moment her alarm sharpens into desperation, then anger, then anger at _him_.

“Did you do something?” Clary accuses, eyes narrowed into slits as Raphael meets them. He wants desperately to scoff in her face. 

He doesn’t even deign to answer, but Simon does it for him. 

“No, no, Clary. He didn’t do shit, alright?” he cuts himself off to heave an audible sigh, hand yanking back his hair as if a metaphor for bargaining for control. “He didn’t do anything. I just, I, I _want_ to stay,” and Simon crosses gazes with Raphael then, his eyes sharp and bright, and Raphael resists the urge to look away. “To make amends.”

Hm. 

Something, like not-yet satisfaction, curls its claws into the empty cavity of Raphael’s chest. 

Her usually pale face reddens with frustration, or humiliation, or some sickly combination of both. Raphael squeezes the life out of his laughter, so that when it slips free from his mouth it’s tasteless, and cold, and dead, like the rest of her and her kind.

Her hand is curling around her blade’s hilt, again. 

It doesn’t take conscious thought. His fangs are out, prickling against his bottom lip, back hunched and body craned forward. “Shadowhunter. I said,” a full snarl, “Leave.”

She leaves, with the click of her boot and a look to Simon as if to promise, _later._ Simon just settles on his haunches and sighs, bone-deep.

Eventually, when they've both lost the angelic scent of her, he sneaks a side-glance at Raphael.

“Is this how you feel all the time?” Simon says, and Raphael almost rolls his eyes.

Almost.

> _By morning, I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better._  
>  -Mary Oliver


End file.
